Today, Donald Trump tweeted: “Too many Universities and School Systems are about Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education. Therefore, I am telling the Treasury Department to re-examine their Tax-Exempt Status…and/or Funding, which will be taken away if this Propaganda or Act Against Public Policy continues. Our children must be Educated, not Indoctrinated!”
Trump’s endless stream of horrible, indefensible statements and actions (such as tonight’s clemency for Roger Stone) makes it tempting for people to overlook a comment so appalling, so disgusting, and so indefensible that it would be universally denounced if anyone else said it.
The idea that the president would order the IRS to investigate all colleges and schools accused of “Left Indoctrination” is a horrifying abuse of power and a direct violation of the First Amendment. It should be noted that nonprofit organizations have First Amendment rights to believe in whatever they want to, and the government cannot discriminate against them. Even if the absurd charge of “Radical Left Indoctrination” against universities were true, it would be well within their legal rights to do that without losing nonprofit status, just as Trump’s friend Jerry Falwell Jr. at Liberty University is free to impose radical right-wing indoctrination (as he does at times).
Trump’s threat against universities is an attempt at brute intimidation, an effort to pressure colleges to silence students and faculty who wish to speak out against the Trump Administration this fall. At too many colleges, as FIRE has noted, the misguided fear of losing nonprofit status leads them to censor political views on campus. Imagine how much worse it will be in 2020 with a president illegally trying to use his power in order to influence his reelection by ordering colleges to censor views that Trump dislikes.
All colleges should resist Trump’s attempts at censorship, and announce that they will support the expression of all views, pro-Trump and anti-Trump. And students and faculty should organize to ensure that critiques of Trump are widely spoken in defiance of his attempts to silence students around the country.
Just as colleges have united to sue Trump for seeking to deport international students, they must sue Trump for giving this unconstitutional order to the Treasury Department.
Ironically, one of the biggest faux-scandals conservatives invented during the Obama Administration was the so-called IRS targeting controversy. Conservative groups falsely claimed that the Obama Administration had ordered the IRS to reject applications from right-wing nonprofit groups. Peggy Noonan even blamed Obama’s re-election in 2012 in part on “IRS corruption” because “the president’s fiercest foes, in the Tea Party, were being thwarted, diverted and stopped.”
In reality, when the Supreme Court’s CItizens United decision opened the door for corporations to spend millions to help secret donors influence elections, right-wing groups began forming large numbers of new non-profit 501(c)4 organizations to help fund Republican efforts, even though it clearly violated the law. For the past two decades, Republicans have been defunding the tax police known as the IRS. Massive cuts in funding and personnel, to help rich tax criminals like Donald Trump avoid being caught, left the IRS badly understaffed. The IRS no longer had enough workers to handle all the new non-profit applications, so they used keywords to identify political groups on the left and the right likely to be created for political purposes and deferred action on them.
Outraged conservatives proclaimed that it was a political attack on them. Speaker of the House John Boehner declared in 2013, “Someone made a conscious decision to harass and to hold up these requests for tax-exempt status….Clearly someone violated the law.”
In 2017, an extensive report by the Treasury Department’s Inspector General found that the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny. A conservative Republican official appointed by George W. Bush was largely responsible for targeting Tea Party groups. Nevertheless, the Trump Administration settled the lawsuit brought by right-wing groups, paying them a “very substantial” settlement and an apology to help perpetuate the myth of political bias by the IRS.
While the story of political bias by Obama was essentially fabricated, Trump’s threat is very real. It’s time to revisit all the Republican politicians and pundits who were appalled by the allegations against the Obama Administration and the IRS, and ask them if they support Trump’s tweet.
Back in 2014, Newt Gingrich proclaimed, “We are watching the most significant crisis of constitutional order since Watergate, the last time an administration broke the law deliberately and repeatedly. And none of the current cases look more Nixonian than what has been happening at the IRS.” What will Newt say about an administration that actually orders the IRS to retaliate against his political enemies?
Donald Trump’s sickening attack on free speech at public and private schools and colleges represents one of the largest assaults on the First Amendment in recent memory. When before has a president openly announced an attack on the free speech rights of tens of millions of students and teachers at tens of thousands of educational institutions?
Crossposted from AcademeBlog.